Revolutionary Value Structures

This week I wanted to finally come back around to a subject that’s been on my mind for quite some time, and would actually mean tackling one of the pieces I promised to write way back in January (but clearly haven’t yet). As a historian of the Soviet Union I work in relatively recent history, in fact it will be only a year and a few months from now the world will be able to look back and reflect on the centennial anniversary of the October Revolution. However, due to the intense politicization of the Soviet system in the West (and of course vice versa) during the Cold War, much of Soviet history today seems to the average observer something like peering onto an alien planet straight out of the futurist sci-fi of the 1920s—which was largely inspired by the revolution, it’s worth noting—or maybe an alternate dimension where people think and behave differently than the world we know. I expect this piece will one way or another be a fruitful exercise, if not for my dissertation than at least for my preparation to teach my Soviet history course this Fall. I want to make Soviet history accessible and engaging, and to do that I think it’s important to teach not just what people did, but how people thought; how they conceptualized the world around them and how that in turn led them to shape it.

This discussion will probably range a lot farther than between the strict confines of 1917 and 1991. After all, modern political revolutions were not invented in the streets of Moscow and Petersburg, nor were they confined there over the course of the tumultuous twentieth century and beyond. The intensity of commitment to or entrenchment of revolutionary value structures varies greatly from revolution to revolution, or even “revolution” (that is to say, a non-revolutionary revolution). In light of some recent events, I think we even have the opportunity to look at some very contemporary case studies to define a revolutionary value structure by what it is not. We’ll come back to this later, though. First, let’s see if we can’t lay out some boundaries so my dear readers can begin to imagine just what the hell it is I’m talking about.

I first began to conceptualize the idea of a “revolutionary value structure” as a response to one of my field exam questions, the beautifully succinct yet poignant “What was Stalinism?” This is probably the question out of all of my exams that I felt most prepared to answer: I spent 4 years trying to come to grips with the political phenomenon of the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Still, though, to definitively answer the question, and not just talk about the myriad possible ways of understanding it, I felt I needed to make my own intervention, as many scholars have come close to capturing but not always defining the term. I admit, I have been heavily influenced by a number of scholars and feel particularly indebted to the works of Stephen Kotkin, Jochen Hellbeck, Shelia Fitzpatrick, and Miriam Dobson, just to name a few. Basically their main methodological innovations were that trying to separate Soviet life into spheres of culture, politics, the everyday, etc., we must try to understand the Soviet experience as a single whole. In this track of thinking, I applied of all things “an inquiry into values”—a philosophical endeavor of Robert Pirsig laid out in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and later expanded on in Lila). If you haven’t read Zen yet, let me first say this: YOU SHOULD. Second, if you haven’t, it can get a little jargonistic in the way he talks about thing like “quality” and “values.” I probably adopted a little too much of that in my analysis, and I’m going to do my best to cut it back and explain my terms when I can, but… yeah, sorry if this gets dense or hard to follow.

So, to begin, just what is a “revolutionary value structure?” If we consider cultural and political norms as regulated by a hierarchy of shared values—or perhaps more precisely, an interlocking, overlapping structure of values—then if we are able to identify those values we can track their rise or fall within the structure over time. I think this can be applied to any civilization—Americans operate under a value structure where “freedom” as a concept is given higher priority than say, I don’t know, “collective safety” or “responsible gun control.” It was the concept that the country was founded on, and in its day, it too was a revolutionary value structure (and I suppose one could even argue it still is, though I think that would be a challenging position to hold given the state of the world today). Myriad value structures exist, not only at state or national levels, but also among social groups, on down, if you care to imagine it, as the unspoken rules that unify a group of friends or even our families. They are by no means immutable, either, as value structures can flex, change, and even be forcibly overthrown (though of course this is no small task—it is typically a revolutionary endeavor).

What makes a value structure, then, revolutionary? My definition would be that a revolutionary value structure is one that puts the health and pursuit of the revolution at the top of the value hierarchy. A revolution in itself can be seen as an attempt to restructure the fundamental value hierarchies that define a society—for instance, to take values like “freedom” or “equality” or “social good” and reshuffle them to create a new model based on the prevailing revolutionary ideology. While these are of course more abstract values to think about, the abstract ones tend to be the values that rise to the top and from which the rest of the hierarchy can stem. 

To examine this, let’s take a look at the case that I have thought the most about: Soviet Russia. From 1917 onward, the Bolshevik Party of the Soviet Union acted according to two primary goals: the defense of the revolution, and the building of socialism. While these objectives invariably shaped Soviet governance during the Civil War and even the NEP, let’s focus here on the revolution as it became more concretely manifest in a system we now commonly refer to as “Stalinism.”

For instance, let’s look at the First Five-Year plan as an assertion of certain values: such as that heavy industry was inherently more valuable important than light because it would produce arms that could be used in the inevitable upcoming conflict with capitalist states. In addition, we can see that collective farming was seen as more valuable than the peasant village. If we broaden our scope in this vein, we can see how these values effected other related concepts. Specialized knowledge of metallurgy would trump an individual’s class background, because for the success of heavy industry, specialists were required. However, in the collective farm, success was seen as dependent on the collective, rather than the individual, and opposition to the collective was then identified through class background (kulak-ism). The campaign against kulaks was also made possible by the high value placed on the security of the revolution, which dictated constant vigilance against reactionary elements of society and held that the possibility of internal enemies and saboteurs bent on the destruction of the world socialist movement. When combined with the high value placed on the development of a modernized industrial base, which meant that food allocation would heavily favor the industrialized cities rather than rural areas, this leads to mass starvation in one of the most agriculturally productive areas in the entire world.

If we are to only look at the values at play and not the results of their interplay, it’s becomes hard to point to a specific place where things went wrong. The emphasis placed on heavy industry is not an inherently immoral choice, and indeed it would eventually allow the Soviet Union to withstand and eventually overcome the onslaught of the highly-mechanized Nazi war machine. The collectivization of agriculture is not inherently less moral than small peasant farming (though the methods used to enforce this decision might be). Nor is the imperative to protect the revolution inherently immoral—the right of a body to defend itself from force is an agreed upon right of humankind, whether it be in the form of a state, nation, or a merchant caravan taking up arms to protect itself from roaming bandits. It is possible to now go back down the chain of events and point directly to instances of immorality and inhumanity. But in the subjective context of that value structure that existed under the First Five-Year Plan, these policies held a higher value, because they were to work toward the spread of socialism and the defense of the revolution. This value ultimately eclipsed the value of an individual human life, and that is where the paradox of Stalinism lies.

               

                This phenomenon is not confined just to the Soviet experience. While I don’t want to spread my scope too far or bore anyone with too specific details, I think it is worth pointing to the first real time a revolutionary value structure was erected in the modern age, and the parallels it has with the revolution of the Bolsheviks: the rule of the Jacobins during the French Revolution. Here was the first time where “defense of the revolution” was elevated as the highest spot within the value structure of the governing body. It inundated society, created a strict divide between allies of the revolution, and potential agents of counter revolution. This was seen as necessary to the revolution’s Jacobin caretakers, because they saw their role as rebuilding French civilization again from the ground up, sweeping away every aspect of the old order from aristocratic privilege to the very ordering of the calendars. In attempting to destroy the old world, many lives would be sacrificed upon the altar of the guillotine. Ultimately, it was this fervor that consumed the Jacobins themselves, and in doing so the long dormant forces of counterrevolution were able to slowly reassert control. 

                If we jump back in time a scant few years and cross the Atlantic Ocean, some would perhaps point to another case worth comparing. However, I actually want to point to the American “revolution” as an incomplete revolutionary model. While it touted the ideals of the Enlightenment and espoused the virtue of freedom from a (largely imagined) “tyranny” of the English, it also helped enshrine a doctrine of slavery and oppression based on a racial and social hierarchy that placed white men squarely on top. By in large, the independence movement of the 13 colonies was an affirmation of the status quo rather than a revolution. The society built in the Americas was already codified by the time they broke free of the label of “colony” had already developed its own value structure based around the core beliefs in private property, personal independence, protestant industry (and of course slavery) that made it a distinct civilization separate from that of its parent empire.[2] The whole “no taxation without representation” was a rather convenient myth—it’s not like the English Empire wasn’t at this time governed by Parliamentary system wherein the colonies did have representatives (albeit with limited powers). Regardless, this was the language used to justify their “revolution” affirming the rights of a select few individuals at the expense of the rest of American society. While we have as a polity made strides to undermine this principle (at least in its most egregious forms), one could reasonably argue that for many this is still the highest value of what they understand to be the once “great” American value hierarchy of which they hope to somehow revive.

                While we’re on the subject of incomplete American revolutions, I feel that we’ve finally reached a safe distance to look back and do an autopsy of the failure of the Sanders campaign to actually deliver on its revolutionary promise. Though I fully supported Sanders’ bid in the primary, there were still many concerns I had with the movement that he helped to form. Ultimately, looking back, it’s actually shockingly easy to see how doomed his campaign was from the start. Many people saw his entrance into the race as an attempt to drag Clinton farther to the left on economic issues.  What I think has become clear now, is that the reverse occurred: every step of the way, Sanders was driven more and more to the center.

                It’s relatively simple, with the power of hindsight, to point to the exact moment where it all went wrong: when Sanders decided to register as a democrat. Yes, he did so to be able to debate Clinton on a national stage and gain the name recognition that helped spread his movement beyond its original bounds of a small circle of independent progressives. In doing so he was able to make a serious challenge to Clinton in what had for years been thought to be an inevitable coronation. However, he also walked the “revolution” he hoped to lead straight into an established bastion of conservatism and counterrevolution.[3]

                We’ve seen it now. We’ve got the emails; we have the proof. Once inside the Democratic party machine, Sanders proposed revolution was cut off, forced to redirect its energies to play political games, all the while being undercut by party officials who ignored their own rules meant to provide an honest primary. We can see here an obvious corollary to my previous point about the revolutions in Russia and France. Since “defense of the revolution” was not the highest priority of Sanders campaign (or even, it seems, within the hierarchy at all), it was doomed to be picked apart by the practiced, steady hand of counterrevolution. (EDIT 8/25/16: further proof: http://www.npr.org/2016/08/24/491242694/bernie-sanders-to-announce-our-revolution-political-group)

                Without this priority of defending the revolution at all costs, really at best the lofty ideals espoused by the Sanders campaign--grassroots political organizing and financing, getting money out of politics, and instituting a basic progressive tax structure—became little more than suggestions for reform, and historically “refolutions” have proven rarely if ever successful in the long term. But long into the primary, before it was clear that Clinton would prevail and provide republicans with the perfect center-Right candidate they had always dreamed of, we still called it a revolution, even as what little trappings of a real revolution the campaign had continued to fall away. The revolution was a story that, for a time, we progressives could believe in. Sadly, in the immortal words of Laura Jane Grace Gable, “the revolution was a lie.”

I feel like this particular discussion actually transitions well into another philosophical venture I’ve been wanting to make: the value of--and the values contained in—stories. The more I think about story-telling and stories in general, the more I understand them as simply system for the transmission of values. This is of course an absurdly broad definition, but if we apply it across the broad spectrum of what constitutes as a “story,” I think it holds up. The fantasy epics of the immortal Hero’s Cycle convey the value of honesty, bravery, and self-sacrifice. The Brothers Grimm fairy-tale of misbehaving children being eaten by the witch of the woods or being snatched up by whatever horrid beast certainly strives to instill the traditional protestant patriarchy. Or a beaming friend telling you about the big ass fish he caught over the weekend attempting to convey the joy of victorious hunt, of a day’s fruitful labor done well. Or more cynically, perhaps it’s the story of an unarmed black man shot by police that becomes a vehicle for white power narratives when an unflattering image of said man is smattered across TV screens and is labeled a “thug” before being implicated (though he will never be convicted, mind you) of committing some petty crime. (A quick aside here: news stories, whatever their actual factual reporting of content, are told through a filter of cultural context where a subjective morality is inferred if not implicitly stated—even relatively objective reporting can’t escape this, though undoubtedly some sources are less objective than others.)

If stories are key then to the transmission of values, it should come as no surprise that revolutions tend to have a massive impact on storytelling and the stories that end up saturating our collective consciousness. Altogether, revolutionary stories help convey the core values that will serve as the building blocks for the new order.

I think for now I will leave off. The “revolutionary value structure” is still just a kernel of an idea that, now that it has taken root in my consciousness, I can’t help but see everywhere I look, especially when I start to think about my research question and how I hope to answer it. It’s a giddy and exciting feeling, and I regret having it taken me this long to put it down on paper. As with all big ideas, it’s going to need some serious refining. I’m already contemplating giving an optional project to my students this fall to try to flesh out what they see to be as pieces of the revolutionary value structure within Soviet civilization as an extra credit assignment. I want to see what fresh (and unbiased) eyes come up with when applying my model, just to see how well it holds water. If I do, I’ll be sure to report my findings here.

For my next installment, however, I want to really come back to the concept of stories and their importance to the human experience. I’ve finally got an idea burning a hole in my pocket, and with the interns finally gone from the jobsite, I’m back on extremely repetitive boring tasks that, while unglamorous, give me time to collect my thoughts. It’s my sincerest intention that there won’t be such a gap before you hear from me again!

Until then, comrades…

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[1] Thermidor was the name of the month in the new revolutionary calendar, during which Maximillian Robespierre’s political “reign of terror” was brought to an end, signaling a retreat away from radical revolutionary tactics and would subsequently lead to a return of aristocratic power at the heart of French politics and, ultimately, made the conditions perfect for a figure like Napoleon to seize power.

[2] Anthony Pagden makes this argument in Lords of all the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain, and France (1998) and points to it as one of the factors that would mark the end of the first “phase” of British colonial ideology, which would undergo a transformation to the more separated and exploitative model that it would use to dominate peoples across Asia and Africa.

[3] If you don’t believe me, even the Atlantic has made the connection: As of 2016, Democrats are now America’s conservative party. Republicans are against the status quo, insofar as they hope to transform the world’s oldest democracy into a fascist police state. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/08/democrats-conservative-party/496670/